1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an improved data processing system. In particular, the present invention relates to a method, apparatus, and computer instructions to bind object references from a remote name space into a local name space using a Web application.
2. Description of Related Art
Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is an architecture that enables objects to communicate with one another regardless of the programming language or operating system of the objects. An object is a self-contained software module or piece of a program. CORBA is a standard for communicating between distributed objects. CORBA provides a means to execute programs written in different programming languages located on various platforms within a network. Using the standard protocol Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP), a CORBA-based program from any vendor, on almost any computer, operation system, programming language, and network, can interoperate with a CORBA-based program from the same or another vendor, on almost any other computer, operating system, programming language, and network. CORBA was developed by an industry consortium, which is named the Object Management Group (OMG).
There are several implementations of CORBA, the most widely used being IBM's System Object Model (SOM) and Distributed System Object Model (DSOM) architectures. Netscape also uses CORBA in the Netscape ONE (Open Network Environment) platform. Two competing models are Microsoft's Component object Models (COM) and Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) and Sun Microsystems' Remote Method Invocation (RMI).
CORBA was designed to allow interoperation of distributed systems. However, until the CORBA Interoperable Name Space (INS) becomes widely available, there is no standard means of contacting a remote name space to obtain an object reference. An object reference unambiguously identifies an object and is never reused to identify another object. Vendors are implementing the CORBA INS as a means of providing a standardized mechanism for accessing a remote name space, but this will not work for the large set of applications existing today, which do not support the CORBA INS.
At runtime, a CORBA client makes requests to remote CORBA objects through an Object Request Broker (ORB). The ORB handles the details involved in routing a request from client to object, and routing the response to its destination. Many ORBs store the information about an object in vendor-specific internal structures. There is a standard form, called the Interoperable Object Reference (IOR) that ORBs use to pass object references to one another across vendor boundaries. The ORB will stringify the reference of an object into a sequence of hexadecimal numbers so that the reference is able to pass over the network without being translated by any of the various filters. If a client does not know the servers ORB, then the client will not be able to access a remote name space on the server. Different vendors do not use the same bootstrap protocol for obtaining a reference to the name service and may use different ORBs, thus creating problems obtaining lookup or reference to a CORBA object.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have an improved method, apparatus, and computer instructions to provide means for accessing the remote name space.